The incident at Hofstra was a SET UP!

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

With more time to process what happened at Hofstra, and with what I already know about the relative motivations and effectiveness of the Nassau County Executive, I have come to the realization that the incident between the local police and Iraq Veterans Against the War was a setup. The objective was to put veteran anti-war groups like IVAW and Veterans For Peace at odds with local DEMOCRATIC politicians who must bear the brunt of the bad PR and possibly (at the County level) punitive damages.

Thanks to the actions of the Nassau County PD, the county is now liable for a lawsuit. This is why the responses from Suozzi’s office have been form letters with not much provided in the way of content which could be used against the County.

Members of IVAW and VFP as well as other interested parties are invited to educate themselves as to Thomas Suozzi’s background and see for themselves just exactly why he was targeted by his Republican underlings, with Peter King’s Department of Hopeless Insecurity goons working very much in the background to excerbate the situation. Specifically…

Suozzi first became County Executive at a time when the county was near bankruptcy, being elected by a 2-to-1 margin in a County with more registered Republicans than any county in New York State. He helped engineer the Democratic takeover of the Nassau County legislature from the once vaunted “Republican machine.” His coattails helped the Democrats keep the Nassau County Legislature (by one vote) and helped Democrat Kathleen Rice dislodge the pro-life Denis Dillon, the Nassau County District Attorney of more than 30 years by about 8,000 votes.

and…

He has had battles with the Nassau County police labor unions. A recent executive decision to withhold a union official’s pay has been the subject of a high profile New York State court case. The union argues that Suozzi ignored competent legal advice, and so should be personally liable.[citation needed]

The latter is based on the fact that Nassau County police are some of the highest paid cops in the nation, and it came to Suozzi’s attention that retiring officers were cashing in on supposedly untaken sick and vacation time. Three officers collected retirement payouts of half a million dollars each at a time when the County was nearly bankrupt.

Another eye-opener is Nassau Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey’s background, which includes work as a consultant for the Department of Hopeless Insecurity as well as some time as the co-founder of a private corporate security contract firm.

By playing behind the arras in this manner, glassy-eyed BushCo cultist Peter King, via his Department of Hopeless Insecurity connections, gets to also take a stab at Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, in whose district the incident occurred. McCarthy couldn’t be much more anti-violence – she was elected on a gun control platform after her husband and son were shot on the LIRR by a psycho.

Both Suozzi and McCarthy have taken and quite effectively held positions once occupied by long standing Republican predecessors in an area of the country that still numbers hundreds of thousands of veterans despite the closings of various area DoD contractors (Sperry/Unisys, Northrup/Grumman and Harris GSSD/PRD among others) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nassau County has been a Republican stronghold for generations, based in part on the heavy DoD presence which arose as the result of Long Island’s strategic importance to national air power which began at the turn of the 20th century and continued into the days of the Cold War. Long Island has been so important to the military/industrial complex for so long that not one but TWO directors of the CIA, George Tenet and William Casey, hail from here. Casey lived for many years in Roslyn, an affluent part of Nassau County.

The Republicans (and their military/industrial complex backers) are pissed that the Democrats are eroding their Long Island power base, and they want Nassau County back – badly. They’ll do anything to get it – including stomping on a few veterans with horses so long as they can blame it on the Democrats in power!

In one fell swoop, Suozzi gets to eat potential punitive damages based on the actions of his police department, and McCarthy gets a black eye as well. That’s unless the antiwar veteran community is smart enough to see what’s going on and adjust their reaction to the incident themselves. We, too, have been played.

I have been in touch privately with Dr. Mac Bica, the coordinator of Veterans For Peace Long Island, as well as Sgt. Kris Goldsmith of IVAW concerning this matter.

The mistake the Rethuglicans have made this time is that they have tried to “play” the wrong people – experienced veterans familiar with the lay of the political landscape in Nassau County. It’s almost insulting that they have expected us to fall for this ridiculously obvious ploy. We are veterans! Officers and enlisted! We’ve seen full tours of active duty. Some of us have seen combat. We know a little bit more about warfare than just how to take orders and do pushups on a drill pad. The deceitful programming we now see in play, not only used on the likes of us but against most of the United States, doesn’t work on us anymore. We are wise to the way there has been an attempt to manipulate us into punishing people who are not truly responsible for what happened, and we are wise to who truly is responsible.

We, too, know how to employ tactics and strategy.

We will have justice.

Crossposted at VetVoice.

Previous diaries on this subject here and here.